Why One Murder Makes Page One and Another Is Lost in the News Briefs

As the aftermath of Matthew Shepard's murder
last October played out  culminating Thursday
with the sentencing of Aaron McKinney to two life
sentences  an equally disgusting crime was
committed in Arkansas, where two men raped and killed a
13-year-old boy. That incident received relatively
little coverage, while Shepard leaves a story that will
probably endure for years to come as a symbol of
intolerance and lowest-common-denominator conformity.

So when TIME.com started getting e-mail from people
wondering why the media weren't paying more attention to
the Arkansas incident, we decided to examine whether we
and other media outlets had been guilty of some sort of
unfairness. (Actually, the media did pay attention, if
only at the lack of ink the story generated. As an
editorial in the conservative Washington Times fumed,
if Shepard had become a cause célèbre, why didn't this
rate the same treatment?) Could it be because we in the
the media elite were unwilling to publicize crimes
committed by homosexuals because it didn't suit our
agenda? The next stop in that line of reasoning was
clear: That news is controlled by a bunch of gay-loving
liberals only too happy to wield a double standard.

What was that story we supposedly buried? According to
news reports  and there were indeed news
reports, both locally and on the national newswires
 Davis Don Carpenter, 38, and Joshua Macave
Brown, 22, from Benton County, Ark., participated in
the rape and murder of Jesse Dirkhising, a 13-year-old
from Prairie Grove. Brown strapped the boy to a
mattress and stuffed underwear in his mouth, held in
place with a bandanna, and repeatedly sodomized him
while Carpenter watched. The boy died from
asphyxiation.

A red herring worth addressing at the outset is the
failure to distinguish between homosexuality and
pedophilia, which creates a false parallel at the core
of the Times' argument. A double standard would be in
effect had the media ignored a situation where two gay
men killed a straight man for being straight. But sex
with children is a crime regardless of the sexes
involved, and is not synonymous with homosexuality.
Brown and Carpenter were roommates, and the details of
their relationship have not been revealed, but evidence
taken from their house  handwritten fantasy
scenarios involving children, as well as diagrams and instructions on how
to sedate, tie up and position a child  indicates a strong interest in pedophilia.

The most salient difference between the Shepard case
and this one, however, is that while Shepard's murderers were driven to kill by hate, the boy's rape and death was a sex
crime. It was repulsive, unconscionable  and the
predictable pastime of perverted criminals. It was the
kind of depraved act that happens with even
more regularity against young females, and, indeed, if
the victim had been a 13-year-old girl, the story would
probably never have gotten beyond Benton County, much
less Arkansas. (There is, of course, a double standard
there.) Matthew Shepard died not
because of an all-too-common sex crime, but because of
prejudice.

Essentially, Shepard was lynched  taken from
a bar, beaten and left to die because he was the
vilified "other," whom society has often cast as an
acceptable target of abuse; Dirkhising was just
"another" to a pair of deviants. And while child abuse
is unfortunately no big news, lynching still is. Aaron
McKinney and Russell Henderson were not satisfying some
animalistic sexual impulse, they were bullies who
gratuitously killed someone out of hate for being
different than they were. It wasn't about them, it was
about Matthew Shepard. Because they dramatically
reflected some of society's darkest influences  an acceptance of the persecution of gays  the
media saw fit to hold the case up as an example.
No one could justify the behavior of Dirkhising's assailants; there is no "pedophile rage" defense. But many in our society think that beating up gays is justifiable, and place the blame on the victims. And while such attitudes may
change, sexual deviancy is timeless.

The reason the Dirkhising story received so little
play is because it offered no lessons. Shepard's murder
touches on a host of complex and timely issues:
intolerance, society's attitudes toward gays and the
pressure to conform, the use of violence as a means of
confronting one's demons. Jesse Dirkhising's death
gives us nothing except the depravity of two sick men.
There is no lesson here, no moral of tolerance, no hope
to be gleaned in the punishment of the perpetrators. To
be somehow equated with these monsters would be a bitter
legacy indeed for Matthew Shepard.